It might be ungainly, but 8GB should be enough media for a few days. Not as ideal as a integrated microSD slot, but better, as you point out, than streaming.

For music, I'd be tempted by by a Sansa Clip and a microSD card. Sorry if I sound like salesman for these little things, but they are cheap. The only advantage a phone offers over it is if you have very long music/spoken word files that you want to skip to halfway through.

I have a 3 foot cable that goes from my Nexus microUSB port back to my pocket. No more losing those pesky little microSD cards. I'd put it in my backback if I wasn't already carrying the UPS to power the RAID setup.

Why would you jump from an S3? They're pretty much the same spec and if you're considering the move, your contract must be up and your warranty with it, so just root and install pure Android on your S3. You can save yourself some pennies on your contract too taking this route.

Probably because Android goes up and down like the bloody Assyrian Empire with heavy use of its native App2SD functionality. A known "feature" of ICS.

Deleting the SD card as a solution does smack of chucking the baby out with the bathwater though, fixing App2SD so the ruddy OS doesn't tend to go titsup.com when an event triggers the use of an app on the SD card is the right approach. Failing that, disabling it for devices with ample internal storage would be better.

No, he's not, although he is a little confused (maybe.) The issue isn't having apps on the SD card but when the SD card is mounted on a PC as USB mass storage it cannot be accessed by the phone making all apps installed on it unavailable.

This is being rectified by using MTP and PTP instead of USB mass storage, meaning both the PC and the phone can access the SD card simultaneously. But obviously if swapping SD cards frequently - something I personally don't do - then the same still applies, those applications would become unavailable.

Can't believe that

8 GB? I mean, my Nexus 7 gets away with only 8GB because I don't have any music on it and it has no camera either, so no photos piling up. But on a smartphone I would want to carry some music and photos and whatever.

Technically I can understand that Google shies away from SD-cards for storage. But no SD cards and only measly 8GB of Flash? Never.

5:3 aspect ratio?

Not enough?

For mp3, 1 minute of music roughly equates to 1 MB. So 8 GB gives you about 136 hours of music, over five and a half day of listening to music without hearing the same song twice(I wish I could listen to radio without hearing the same song twice in five days! ). If I would ever find the time and energy to rip my entire CD-collection, it would not even fill 8GB, but still I have CD's I haven't played in years.

Re: Not enough?

There's also the OS on there and apps and their data and photos and whatnot. Put 3 or 4 GB of music on it (and many people aren't very good at pruning their music library and dragging files around all day) and it already gets very tight very soon. No, 8GB with no extension is just not enough these days for a smartphone. My phone has 16GB and I have to clean things up now and then already to make room.

360deg camera?

Re: 360deg camera?

I'm guessing this is just an extension of the already included panoramic functionality. Perhaps that is a hint towards the OS being version 4.2 as if it is just extending panoramic to 360 degrees, I would expect that to be a software enhancement more than a camera hardware feature.